Poor old Toyota. We were doing a multi-car C/D test on the streets of Manhattan one morning in the early Seventies, and I was struck by an epiphany. But I wasn’t badly injured and continued my work. It had come to me suddenly that the Japanese, Toyota in particular, had set out to build the best little American cars on the planet, better than anything built or imagined by what was called “The Big Three” back in those innocent times.

I would have bet you a new ’73 Chevelle—the one we called “the Russian model”—that Toyota would never start playing the Detroit game, cutting costs and quality to keep prices down and volume up. But now Toyota is recalling enough cars to put everybody in Haiti on wheels. I tend to be cynical about “unintended acceleration” because we’re all blessed with brakes that are more powerful than our engines, but I don’t work for a daily newspaper, where they love the idea that the nation’s motor pool might suddenly rear up and drive itself through private residences and public meetings with corresponding loss of life.

This is all very down-market and not something up with which the Japanese builders of the best little American cars in the world should have to put.